Thousands of Yazidis trapped on Mount Sinjar were rescued by Kurdish forces in 2014, but others were not so lucky.
Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

Until 2014, Abdullah Shrem was a beekeeper in Iraq, tending to his hive and selling honey across the mountains of Sinjar. Then Islamic State forces arrived, announcing their terror in symbols daubed on the doorways of the homes they raided: “They wrote the letter Y on our homes and on our stores and built a barrier like the Berlin Wall – N for the Christians, and Y for the Yazidis. S for the Sunnis, and Sh for the Shi’ites,” Shrem recalls.

The Yazidis met the worst fate: men were marched into mass graves and shot, while women were separated – young from old, mothers from children, wives from virgins. The younger were taken to a “marketplace” to be sold as sex slaves or sabaya; the older were killed or sold as domestic slaves.

Shrem’s response was extraordinary: he left beekeeping to create a network of rescuers – modelled on the female-led fortress of the beehive – who would return the kidnapped women to their families. “I cultivated a hive of transporters and smugglers from both sexes to save our queens,” he tells Dunya Mikhail, an American-Iraqi journalist, whose book is centred on the women Shrem rescues. In fact, he does not save only women, but also children, men and entire families. His story is worthy of being made into a film, his resourcefulness and everyman heroism carrying shades of Oskar Schindler.

It is a disappointment and yet a credit to Mikhail’s vision that Shrem remains on the sidelines as a worker bee of sorts, rather than a fully fleshed-out hero. Instead, the women form the book’s heart. Their stories, however courageous, read like a litany of horrors, some painfully detailed, others stark in their deadpan summaries. There is Zuhour, a pregnant mother of two whose husband is buried alive by Isis. Then there is Maha: “First they sold her eldest daughter and then, after tying her up and beating her, they killed her three sons right before her eyes” – because she tried to escape from her Isis “owner”. And Claudia, who tells Mikhail of a beautiful 10-year-old girl, Lalish: “They took her away at night, didn’t bring her back until morning. She came with dried blood all over her feet … she was naked, and they threw her clothes on top of her.”

The book contains innumerable other accounts: the US convert who shows his sabaya a picture of his wife and children back home; the militant who lends out his sabaya when he goes away; the men, high on drugs, who read the Qur’an before raping their “brides”; the women who watch their children being killed; the children who watch their mothers being raped.

The book attempts to rehumanise a war that has been reported on so often from an aerial, abstracted viewpoint

A body of literature about Isis atrocities is emerging; Nadia Murad’s The Last Girl and Kassem Eid’s My Country are two recent accounts of childhoods heinously interrupted by the group’s barbarity. Both have been endorsed by well-known western figures (Amal Clooney and Janine di Giovanni respectively). Mikhail’s book speaks for itself. What is striking is the unaugmented record of experiences, transcribed in first-person testimonies and knitted together with Shrem’s words.

In her book, Murad laments: “Sometimes it can feel like all that anyone is interested in when it comes to the genocide is the sexual abuse of Yazidi girls.” The Beekeeper of Sinjar gives us a broader picture. We hear from men who are shot and left for dead and from mothers about sons who are brainwashed and trained to become Isis “martyrs”. The multiplicity of voices creates a verbatim record – a chorus of experience – rather than following the more well-worn narrative arc of heroic exceptionalism.

There are, though, awkward moments when Mikhail is at pains to show her faithfulness to the spoken word, including the minutiae of her phone conversations with Shrem. A tonal shift halfway through is even more dissonant, as she begins to tell her family story of exile from Baghdad in 1991, during Operation Desert Storm, in ever more abstract and lyrical language. She throws in poetry and dreams. It feels clunky and contrived at times, particularly set against the unadorned accounts of the rescued women.

Yet her ruminations can be moving. In one passage, she describes an aerial image at a museum in Pittsburgh that “reminded me of the 1991 Gulf War when the satellites took pictures of us from above”. From this vantage point, she says, “it isn’t possible ... to recognise the lives of the inhabitants … From above, the burnt fields and bewildered animals look more like abstraction.”

It is an apt visual metaphor for the book, which attempts to rehumanise a war that has been reported on so often from an aerial, abstracted viewpoint. She takes us back to the ground – to all the terrible, fragile, human detail, so that its victims and survivors can be seen as they are, made painfully of flesh and blood.

•The Beekeeper of Sinjar by Dunya Mikhail, translated by Max Weiss, is published by Serpent’s Tale. To order a copy for £8.99 (RRP £10.99), go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.